The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard - Страница 46
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sin that he said he had to atone for. It might have something to do with that.”
“You mean he’s both atoning and getting even?”
“It’s not that rare a combination in family affairs.”
Several figures approached us across the tile terrace behind
the guesthouse where most of us were staying. None of them
was Griswold. I wanted to tell him that I had figured out how
he was planning on financing his Buddhist center. And I wanted
to assure him that since he — not his sister-in-law — was my
client now, I was not about to spill the beans. Unless, of course, he was planning on misbehaving in some annoying way and
somehow putting all of us in immediate terrible jeopardy yet
again.
Pugh, Kawee and Mango joined us by the pool. Mango had
just come by bus from Bangkok, and Pugh said Miss Nongnat
had also arrived. “She’s upstairs powdering her nose,” Pugh
said. Pugh’s wife and children were on the way and would arrive
soon, and his girlfriend Furnace was in a friend’s house up the
road with Miss Aroon keeping her company.
“Have you had rice yet?” Pugh asked and said that Ek had
gone into town to pick up some eats for everybody.
Nitrate brought drinks out — beer, Coke, fruit juices,
bottled water, and bird-spit beverage. Timmy asked, “How do
they get the birds to spit into that small container? Are there
bird charmers who make a profession of this?”
“When elephant mahouts grow old and are forced to retire,”
Pugh said, “many of them switch careers and become bird
mahouts. It’s so much less rigorous a life. As with the elephants, a bird mahout develops a long-term relationship with one bird
and can make it spit into one of these little bottles on
command.”
The Thais all had a good laugh over this, and they seemed
pleased when Timmy laughed too.
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 203
“No, really,” Pugh said, “the birds use their saliva as mortar
when building their nests. The nests are filched — regrettably
for the birds, I must say — and then boiled, and the resulting
fluid is the basis for this tasty beverage.”
I had a beer, but Timmy tried the bird-spit juice and said, “I
guess this is as close to kissing a bird as I’ll ever get.”
“That depends on how long you remain in Thailand,” Pugh
said, and the Thais all laughed, though I wasn’t sure why.
Mango had come out into the hot night wearing a skimpy
yellow bathing suit. As the rest of us sat drinking and kidding
around, he approached the pool, and I fully expected him to
execute a perfect godlike swan dive. Instead he climbed onto
the diving board and jumped in holding his nose. He came to
the surface glistening in the moonlight and then hoisted himself out of the pool and — with the un–self-consciousness and easy
grace of a gifted athlete — remounted the board and jumped in
again holding his nose.
I wondered if there might be some tension between the two
when Griswold came out and encountered the man with whom
he was once in love and who had, Griswold believed, destroyed
that love with Mango’s devotion to Donnutt and with his
money-boy activities involving a number of other farangs. Pugh
said, however, that Griswold had gone into town with Ek and
Egg to use the Internet cafe and look at documents from the
other investors in the Sayadaw U project. So we had at least a
brief reprieve from any awkward meeting between the two.
Any worries over a confrontation soon became moot,
however. Pugh took a call from Ek, who said that outside the
Internet cafe, as they were leaving, Griswold was admiring the
rented bicycle of a Swedish tourist, and suddenly grabbed it,
jumped on, and sped off. They chased him on foot, but
Griswold was both deft and fast on the bike, and they lost him.
Once they retrieved their van, Griswold had already been lost in the crowds of tourists pouring in and out of the Hua Hin
hotels, bars, massage parlors, and schnitzel joints.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Pugh sent several of his men into town to search for
Griswold, and he called people he knew and trusted to be on
the lookout for a sweaty farang on a stolen bike. Griswold was
carrying next to nothing with him, but he did have his shoulder
bag with his multiple ATM cards. He did not have his passport
with him, however, and he would need that to check into a
hotel. Unless, of course, he crammed his bag full of bahts at an ATM and bribed his way past a desk clerk. Griswold could also,
Pugh said, phone someone he knew and trusted to come and
pick him up. Plainly he had friends in high places in Thailand.
Those people presumably could keep Griswold safe until April
27 when General Yodying supposedly would be neutralized.
“But what about us?” was Timmy’s reasonable question to
Pugh. “We aren’t exactly off the hook, I don’t think.”
“No, Mr. Timothy. We are indeed still very much up shit
creek. Even if we were to inform General Yodying that Khun
Gary is no longer in our custody, he would be unimpressed.
First, he might not believe us. Second, it is not Khun Gary
running around loose that the top cop desires, and we are the
enablers of Griswold’s freedom. Third, there is the not
inconsequential matter of our having snatched the general’s
missus and left her stranded in a closet clad only in a garbage
bag. I think that that monstrous affront alone is the main
reason he plans on drilling holes in our souls before hurling
them — and their present corporeal manifestations — into a
hell beyond our imagining but not quite beyond his.”
I told Pugh about the phone call from Bob Chicarelli and
my belief that Griswold and some Thai investors were behind
the takeover of Algonquin Steel. “So Griswold, I think, is so
obsessed with this corporate raid and using it to punish his
brother, and to atone for some long-ago Griswold family sin,
that he’ll do anything to be able to operate freely until the
twenty-seventh of this month.”
206 Richard Stevenson
“Ah, yes,” Pugh said. “Two and seven.” He seemed to think
this explained a lot.
Ek appeared with the take-out food he had picked up before
Griswold bolted. As he spread the containers of rice and soup
out on a table near the pool, along with spoons and chopsticks,
Ek spoke to Pugh in Thai in a tone of self-deprecation and
apology. He was plainly mortified that he and Egg had let Pugh
get away, but Pugh spoke back to him consolingly.
Pugh said in English, “Ek blames himself for Khun Gary’s
flight. But it was a collision of karmas — his bad, Griswold’s
good — and he is not to blame. Not, at least, in the present
circumstances. I told him, however, that he should (a) make an
offering to the spirit of the Enlightened One at the earliest
opportunity, and (b) get his ass back out there and drag that
SOB Griswold back here pronto. The guy couldn’t have gone
far. Though first, of course, Ek must have rice.”
We all dug in, the Thais considering their food as they ate it
as if it was both fun to eat and holy.
Kawee had stripped to his thong and had been enjoying a
swim with Mango, and soon they both came over to the table
for some eats. Noting the uncommonly large bulge in skinny
little Kawee’s thong, I glanced at Timmy, who nodded, and I
thought, Holy Moses.
Ek ate quickly and soon left to help with the search for
Griswold.
Pugh said, “The chances are good that if Griswold has
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